Pakistan is all fit for World Cup challenge. Thanks PCB

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The whole fitness saga of Pakistani team just adds more into our continuous misery that started with Shoaib Akhtar’s injury during Indian tour last year.
According to BBC, there has been reports that Malik and Umer Gul were not fit, yet got selected for SA tour. Gul returned without having played a single test.
Malik was retained in SA by team management in hope that he will be fit and required for ODIs.
Shabbir and Razzaq are also unfit, yet they are selected, Shabbir is back after giving this nation a huge favour of 2 overs in Twenty20 game.
And the top icing to the matter is the fact that Kamran Akmal is unfit since England tour, as mentioned by RashidL in Cricinfo interview. Yet he is playing only because of his fear of losing his place in national team. Deep inside, he knows that there are better contenders in domestic who will line up as soon as he is rested for a series, and if anyone impresses with keeping, will be pressured to keep in the team, instead of declining Akmal. :mad:

This is the height of unprofessional behavior of not only the players, who are hiding their injuries, but the team management who are still selecting them even if they can see it in nets that the player can’t deliver, or looks unfit despite of his claim. Also the three gora (one trainer and two physio) are also not reporting the real picture of players’ health. Looks like team management and players have successfully corrupted gora trainers as well. This is a total disaster of team management and medical commission. PCB needs to be spanked on such blunders. Salim Altaf (the CHAY) has announced that there WILL be an investigation on team’s return on this matter.

Khuda ka khauf karo, WC sar per hai aur yahan aadhi team unfit hai, kuch tou months se unfit hi khel rahe hain dar ke marey.

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Re: Pakistan is all fit for World Cup challenge. Thanks PCB

PCB is a pathetic bunch of losers and a joke!!! :mad:

Even though my heart says Pakistan will earn a spot in the semi finals, my head (probably rightly) says it ain’t gonna happen. :frowning:

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Re: Pakistan is all fit for World Cup challenge. Thanks PCB

Do you guys remember what Imran Khan was saying about when Shoaib Akkhtar was left behind as "injured"? He was saying the same thing which is now being revealed about other players i.e. keep them aboard if they are injured and there are chances they'll recover/get-fit during the series. Though I am myself against taking anyone injured with the team over seas.

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Re: Pakistan is all fit for World Cup challenge. Thanks PCB

Although I don't expect Pakistan to win the WC simply because we are not consistent and professional enough to be world-beaters yet, I do expect us to make it to the semis. The format of this WC is very similar to 1999 WC (super-six format) with every team playing 7 games during the super-eight round. The only difference being this time there is a super-eight instead of super-six round and the minnows will be eliminated before the super-eight stage. If you remember WC 1999, Pakistan made it to the semis despite losing two of their super-six games against Bangladesh and South Africa. So even if Pakistan lose 2-3 matches at the super eight stage they should still in theory make it to the semis.

Look at England. Today they secured an improbable place in the CWB series Finals after beating NZ who everyone thought were the second-best team in the tournament. Only a week ago, England had become a laughing stock after getting bowled out for 110 and 120 against Australia and NZ respectively. A couple of wins against Australia and NZ since then and they are in the Finals.

While Australia are clearly head and shoulders the no. 1 team in test cricket, no team can be underestimated in the one-dayers. That said Australia remain the side to beat in the forthcoming WC.

The momentum at the moment is not with Pakistan but it could all change with a better showing against SA tomorrow and let's hope that they get their selections esp. the batting order right for tomorrow's game i.e Yousuf and Inzi should come in at 4 and 5 respectively.

Who share more, guys or girls
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Re: Pakistan is all fit for World Cup challenge. Thanks PCB

February 4, 2007
Posted by Kamran Abbasi at 11:41 PM in Politics
A cricket board with much to answer

‘Dr Nasim Ashraf promised: “By the start of the new year, I want the board to turn a new leaf and work under the new constitution.” Where is it?’ © AFP

Now is the time for anguish, pain, inquisition. When cricketers underperform we see their sins laid before us, especially if we’ve managed to acquire ourselves a high-definition widescreen television. Yet it’s the men who scurry around in the shadows that worry me. Most Pakistan supporters had hoped for a regime that would stabilise the international team. Events have conspired against the current cricket board, of course, but the last few months have produced more questions than answers. Here are some issues that are troubling me:
1 Dr Nasim Ashraf promised: “By the start of the new year, I want the board to turn a new leaf and work under the new constitution.” Where is it?
2 He also said: “We intend to plan for it [the World Cup] in detail. I am fully intent on making the selection process foolproof.” Hmm, perhaps “approved by fools” would have been more accurate? The handling of Shoaib Akhtar, Shabbir Ahmed, Azhar Mahmood, and Shahid Afridi, for example, could hardly be interpreted as foolproof.
3 Waqar Younis. An enlightening exchange between Salim Altaf, director of PCB operations, and Waqar on GEO television was a public relations triumph for Waqar. Altaf, who revealed himself to be a man mired in bureaucracy and unwilling to address Waqar’s complaints directly or in detail, implied that Waqar had been employed by the board for just under a year without any appraisal or review of his performance. Shameful management, I’d say. No wonder then that Waqar’s role drifted so far from his original job description to render it irrelevant. Yet Altaf clung to that original job description as if variation from it was impossible and used it to justify the board’s final treatment of Waqar.
My view is that the board handled Waqar’s ouster in a crass and insulting manner. By Waqar’s own admission, Bob Woolmer and Inzamam-ul Haq both preferred to have Mushtaq Ahmed as assistant coach. But on the evidence of the first two crash-wallop games in South Africa, Pakistan’s fast bowlers are going backwards rather than forwards.
Indeed, to say that Waqar would not be useful for one-day games is mindboggling for Pakistan supporters who saw him become one of the greatest one-day bowlers ever, particularly in pressure situations. Not just that, he was a pioneer.
4 Mushtaq Ahmed. I want to understand how one minute Justice Qayyum’s inquiry can be used as one of the reasons to keep Mushtaq out of the coaching set up but is then conveniently forgotten a few months later? Where’s the intergity in that about turn?
5 Appointments by acquaintance. It’s not always wise to protest too much. The PCB has got into a peculiar habit of refuting criticism by penning rebuttals in newspapers. One such rebuttal denied a charge of nepotism in appointments at the board and refuted an earlier piece published in Dawn, Pakistan’s most highly-respected newspaper.
I made some inquiries of my own and discovered that senior Pakistani journalists are convinced Ahsan Malik, the new head of media at the PCB, is closely related to Nasim Ashraf. Malik was one of the first appointments by Ashraf’s regime. Now my view is that it is fine to appoint a relative provided they happen to be the best person for the job. Unfortunately, the jury is out on Malik. And now that the board has publicly denied this relationship–in a piece curiously penned by Malik himself–it has got itself into a potentially disastrous situation. The disaster would be this: If the two are indeed related, which senior journalists insist that they are, then I do not see how either of them can remain in post having denied that they are related to each other?
To add to the sequence of doubtful recruitments, the PCB appointed PJ Mir, a friend of both Ashraf and President Musharraf, as its media manager for the World Cup.
Where’s the independence in these appointments? Not much if critics are to be believed.
6 One of the latest media brainwaves is for the PCB to help newspapers send journalists on foreign tours by introducing a “cost-sharing” scheme. Excuse me, in case I’ve forgotten how journalism works, but anything that compromises the independence of those journalists is unacceptable. In a poor country like Pakistan, he who pays the piper really does call the tune. Most journalists in Pakistan do not enjoy the power, freedom, or the pay of their colleagues in richer countries, and the PCB’s initiative is not one of liberation but of media management.
7 With each new PCB regime we are promised merit, ethics, and transparency. Nasim Ashraf’s is no different. He also said he wanted to be judged by performances and not mere words. Well, I’m afraid that both the words and performances are causing concern.
Pakistan fans, who care passionately about their favourite game, want some answers. This is not just about the World Cup–although it partly is–but it is about something far deeper in Pakistani society: Whether or not we can trust our major institutions?
If the PCB were to address these concerns I would be delighted to share its responses here. Don’t hold your breath though, this is a cricket board already with much to answer.

http://blogs.cricinfo.com/pakspin/archives/2007/02/a_cricket_board_with_much_to_a.php#more

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Re: Pakistan is all fit for World Cup challenge. Thanks PCB

yeah a very fit unit…fit enough for another beating/thrashing/spanking…:stuck_out_tongue: :k:

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Re: Pakistan is all fit for World Cup challenge. Thanks PCB

Here’s another pertinent article

One-day series in South Africa: What planning?
Asif Iqbal (Former Pakistan and Kent cricket captain )

LONDON: The limited overs series that Pakistan is currently engaged in in South Africa will be the last international exposure Pakistan get before the World Cup. The first two matches, the Twenty20 game last Friday and the first one dayer at Centurion Park on Sunday, have both been such complete disasters for Pakistan that unless fortunes change pretty quick, it is a moot point whether the South Africa experience will enhance Pakistan’s preparation for the World Cup or wipe out whatever confidence the side may have accrued in the build up to the mega event thus far.

The worst aspect of Pakistan’s almost humiliating defeats has been that barely a month away from the World Cup, the team does not have what anyone would described as a settled look to it. It seems that all the questions that were raised four years ago during the last World Cup and to which the management has been struggling to find answers, today remain as unanswered as they ever were.

For one, the crucial opening slots do not have settled incumbents even now. Perhaps in this the management is not to be blamed for the players are just not there. Imran Farhat has been shown to have so obvious a deficiency in one area of his technique that he stands thoroughly exposed and that weakness outside his off stump will be exploited with merciless persistence.

There is now also a question mark over the wicket-keeping slot and it does seem as if Kamran Akmal to justify his place in the side will have to take on the role of one of the two openers. That is not because he has shown any particular ability for the job or because he has had any noteworthy success in the role, but more due to the resigned assessment that he is perhaps as likely to score a few as anyone.

Imran Nazir who has been out of international cricket for some time is yet to be given a run and if he is given a chance, and makes a few, we could well have someone going into the World Cup again on the back of a handful of performances. If that possibility is out, it is difficult to see what he is doing in South Africa.

The future of the seam attack is as much under a cloud of mystery as anything else. Will Shoaib be fit? Will Umar Gul be fit? Will Shabbir be fit? Even if they are all fit, none of them has had much international cricket in the months leading up to the World Cup which raises questions not just about their form but also about their ability to last out a tournament that runs for the better part of six weeks.

We saw Shoaib declare himself fit and then become unfit after bowling less than a dozen overs; we heard that Shabbir had also declared himself fit and all that it took to get him unfit was a barely a couple of overs. If that sort of thing were to happen again in the Caribbean it would be disastrous.

Both Rana Naved and Mohammad Sami have, on the basis of the two limited overs outings so far in South Africa, had experiences they would rather forget and Mohammad Asif cannot bowl 50 overs on his own. Both Razzaq and Afridi are on the comeback trail and neither has given enough evidence to convince me that they are likely to make meaningful contributions; and time, for both, as well as for Pakistan, is running out. As things stand, the only ones who qualify as automatic selections are Younis, Yousuf, Inzamam and Asif. There could be any number of “probables” who could take up the other seven slots.

In fact, latest news suggests that the list of “probables” is ever expanding. We have now heard that Azhar Mahmood is proceeding to South Africa and so is Rao Iftikhar Anjum. Azhar is a fine cricketer but the point is that he was not even in the list of 30 from which the final World Cup squad is to be selected and now finds himself in a series just before the World Cup which should be a trial run for the final squad. It is debatable if he will now even be allowed to make the World Cup squad since his name is not among the original 30 submitted for the World Cup but even if he is, where is the planning if someone who has been out of the reckoning for years is suddenly called back four matches before the World Cup?

Such haphazard measures suggest that we really do not know whether we are coming or going. It makes about as much sense as having a leg spinner for a bowling coach when the one day squad does not have a single leg spinner (with Kaneria having been sent back home). Our seamers bowled a plethora of wides and no balls at Centurion and I cannot see how a former leg spinner can be expected to sort that out.

Inzamam’s captaincy in the first ODI also left much to be desired. He persevered with Rana Naved for far too long and his decision to come back with him for a second spell was difficult to understand. His decision to take the second period of power play was still more puzzling with South Africa going at almost seven an over.The flexibility in the power play has been allowed for just such a situation in which a fielding side can fall back on defence to come back after picking up a few wickets. It seems to me as if he makes his plans before he takes the field and then sticks to them no matter what. That surely is not the way to go.

With just four one day internationals to play before the all important World Cup, the time for experimentation is long over. By now, we should have a settled side with one or two minor adjustments to make here and there and the settled side should have been readily identifiable. That, regrettably, does not seem even remotely to be the case.

Source: http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=41665

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Re: Pakistan is all fit for World Cup challenge. Thanks PCB

Imran is correct but there is a difference in carrying half fit Akhtar or Inzi or Yousaf along and in carrying along Razzaq or Malik; where Pakistan does not have a comparable replacements for these three, how they do have good replacements in Azhar/Yasir or Rehman/Nazir for Razzaq and Malik. So giving a free ride to Malik, Gul, Shabir, Razzaq is just waste of nation money.